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LATIN AMERICAN
Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico. By Edward Wright-Rios. [Diálogos Series.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 390. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-82634659-9.)
Edward Wright-Rios's monograph traces the cultural history of Madre Matiana, an (almost certainly) fictional prophetic nun from her invention shortly after Independence by Catholic activists to the 1960s, by which time she had become a stock figure of popular culture exemplifying the beata-a "dowdy and puritanical" matron (p. 1). The book is organized chronologically, with its first four chapters examining Madre Matiana's nineteenth-century existence. The "real" Matiana was an exceptionally pious nun cast out of her convent by post-Independence War upheavals. She foretold the doom that awaited Mexico should the nation continue down the path of secularism and liberalism. Although largely ignored at first, her prophecies found a broad audience when a Catholic press closely aligned with the Conservative Party reprinted them in 1847, during the cataclysmic U.S. invasion. They became...